TRANSITION

Calm and sage, superlawyer Cutler was for many years a gray eminence in Washington. Two presidents, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, brought Cutler into the White House to help deal with crises and scandals, and drug companies and automakers beat a path to his door. But Cutler also won landmark legal victories for the NAACP and Greenpeace, and he was known as a consensus-maker who could rise above partisanship--a rare breed in the nation's capital these days.